First Steps on the Path
There is to every man’s mind a part like the dark side of the moon that he never sees but I was being privileged to see it. It was like interstellar space in the Night of the Gods, and in it were the roots of my being. 50
The heroes of the four books, in a deeply introspective mood, weigh up what has brought them to this place in their lives. In so doing, they open up the deeper aspects of their natures to us. This review process reveals their underlying emotional states and is essential for the clarity they need to move forward, and we learn a lot about their characters in a very short time. We will examine these briefly now, and place them in the context of their present lives. For after skating on the surface of life, the characters will begin to feel connected with a deeper purpose, and we can join them on their journey.
In Qabalistic terms, this is our entry into the bottom sephirah of the Tree: Malkuth, also called the “kingdom.” This happens through paying attention to our bodies and the messages of our senses, an apparently simple process that is our first vital magical tool.
Dion Fortune divides her heroes by energetic qualities—two positive and two negative—but all are in hostile circumstances. The positive characters—Ted Murchison and Rupert Malcolm—resent and stolidly endure. Rupert overworks to suppress his demons, and Ted deliberately turns from his known world when he reaches the end of the line. The negative men—Wilfred Maxwell and Hugh Paston—have their sense of themselves gradually eroded. Wilfred gives up life in favour of dope-induced dreams, and Hugh withdraws before collapsing in a crisis. They are at the point of having given up life as a bad job; each has done all that is expected by society, yet had no recompense from life.
The plots quickly move them: the positive Ted and Rupert of The Winged Bull and Moon Magic stay in the city, whilst Wilfred and Hugh of The Sea Priestess and The Goat-Foot God are quickly removed to the country.
Here are more useful messages. First, we do not need to wait for ideal circumstances to start our inner work. The work will create the circumstances. Second, whilst an isolated place may be the ideal for occult work, the demonstrations of magic in action show how diverse those places might be in practice. They invite us to be creative, to search out and develop our own magical working spaces. The importance of the space, wherever it is, is in the dedication.
Feeling at home and being embodied are primary requirements to coming to a deep connection with the world. We must experience the sense of space and place fully in the stories for the subtle interplay to work as Dion Fortune layers sensual impressions to seduce all our senses, to build magical dwellings that live deep within our imaginations.
The Hero at Home
By contrast with the ideal of the magical dwelling, our heroes feel that there is nowhere to call home. They are emotionally and spiritually adrift, and go through a series of significant physical moves that mirror their psychological journey. All are in painfully restrictive circumstances, and they are searching for “the hint of escape—a glimpse of fire from the heart of the stone—the gates of life ajar,” 51 which hints of a world of greater, and magical, possibilities. It is not accessible through the normal channels of society, but is what our heroes crave. It is a craving many of us share with them.
All four men live, and all four books start, in urban environments, which are worth comparing.
Acton and Dickford:
The Winged Bull and The Sea Priestess
Ted Murchison lodges in Acton, where the petty rules reflect a narrow thought and meanness of spirit that mirrors Dickford, the small town where Wilfred Maxwell (The Sea Priestess) markets his properties. The vicar (Ted Murchison’s brother) and Wilfred the estate agent inhabit a grey area above working class but very definitely not of the top drawer: a division of the class structure would have been instantly understood by Fortune’s original readers. Acton and Dickford are restrictive societies encouraging the aspirational snob, an accurate description of both men’s relatives.
London: Mayfair and Gloucester Road:
The Goat-Foot God and Moon Magic
Hugh Paston, the man of means, is a drifter around Mayfair, of the privileged, bored, and disengaged class. Their manners and morals are despised by the educated and artistic Jelkes and Mona, and friendship blossoms when it is clear that Hugh agrees with their judgment. Hugh’s salvation is escaping the artificiality of Mayfair to the homely, organic nature of Jelkes’s shop.
Rupert Maxwell, the successful professional, has two dwellings, in London and by the sea, but feels at home nowhere. His digs by the River Thames are devoid of comfort or companionship: his house by the sea is home to his invalid wife and her companion, to which he is a barely tolerated visitor. His harsh manner alienates him from friendships, even among the professional class.
To sum up, both Ted and Wilfred have their powerlessness and disconnection pointed up by malicious servants in league with their womenfolk: Hugh is unaware of his wife’s infidelity, though his housekeeper knew of it; Rupert has no dealings with those who serve him and resists any effort to change or improve his cheerless conditions. The lack of the sympathetic influence of women in their lives is a grave imbalance.
Their Response to the World
Ted Murchison is the bull of the title, but tethered and baited, stolid and powerless. Unable to earn enough to make a life worth living, he exists in his brother’s overcrowded house with a ghastly family and a sister-in-law who believes in kicking a man when he is down as the best way of helping him to rise.
Hugh Paston is valued only for his money and initially feels that is appropriate; he suffers with a mother and grasping sisters who exert a kind of moral blackmail. He has faded out of his own society, just going through the motions. He wants nothing, and his housekeeper sees him going downhill, heading towards mental trouble.
Wilfred Maxwell’s position in the household is undermined by the servants’ allegiance to his sister’s petty morality. Highly imaginative, he becomes quietly subversive. He pricks the pomposities of society, subverts his sister’s charitable schemes and daydreams.
Rupert Malcolm exists in a bubble of overwork, unaware of his effect on the rigid medical establishment: he offends against the rules and barges his way through life. He follows the dictates of society to the letter, doing his duty by his wife and career, and becomes a workaholic to escape the need to engage with any form of empathic human interaction.
They have all been in these situations for a long time, so that stasis is now causing sepsis. In each case, a life poisoned by circumstance has reached a crisis point, and something must happen.
The Hero’s First Journey
In both the outer and the inner world, all the heroes travel to meet their fates—even the chronically ill Wilfred, whose physical journey is a walk of a very few steps.
Crossing a large courtyard in the fog, tramping the city streets, discovering your own back yard, or walking by the river might seem insignificant actions, but each is cathartic. The inner journey of discovery is reflected in the real world, and each walk has a profound effect. And Dion Fortune tells us these walks are significant because each hero acts out of character, prompted by a deep instinct that cannot be explained rationally. It is that instinct to enter the dimly sensed larger reality behind the real world.
Walking is a valuable psychological tool, its repetitive nature inducing reflection. During their walks, the heroes examine their past lives.
Ted’s musings tell us that he has been brave, charismatic, and a leader of men, and is still an upright, soldierly man with his integrity intact; he has refused criminal work, although his jobs have been a series of seedy dead ends. Absorbed, he is in a highly sensitive state when he reaches the British Museum.
Wilfred’s journey is into the imaginal realms, when he is bedridden by severe asthma after a family argument. He is exposed to the moon, and his weakness and heavily drugged state lead to a deep connection to a cosmic reality behind the everyday. To escape his relocation into “a dungeon” of a room in the main house, his physical journey is to the bottom of the garden, to find the old stables where he will live.
Hugh Paston has the clearest boundary between his present and his future life: the funeral of his wife. Highly sensitised, conflicted by bereavement and his sense of betrayal, he has a revulsion against staying in a house that seems dead and empty.
Rupert Malcolm, like Hugh, leaves precipitately—in his case, from an awards ceremony—without a hat or money, in his hurry to meet an appointment with fate. His inflexibility makes him irritable and a restless sleeper, and his reserves are running low.
For the first time, Rupert walks along the deserted Embankment to get to his lodgings: the glamour of the water reminds him of his earliest ambition to work with ships. It is as he explores this inner dreamworld of seascapes by the side of the River Thames that he remembers the mysterious woman’s figure in his dream, and is thrilled to spot her actually walking along the Embankment, far ahead of him.
And Then We Have the Mist …
Like a thread running through all the books is the use of time and weather—both frequently liminal—which have a profound effect on both characters and reader. Place is most definitely a character in the books, and each can be a boundary space to aid the process of initiation. Through reading we are encouraged to open to the universe and recognise the influential forces of our surroundings, thus fulfilling in part Fortune’s hope that the novels will initiate an inner change.
The weather is often referred to as “the elements,” which are the building blocks of the natural world and magical practice. And of all the natural states, mist indicates liminality, the in-between state that allows possibilities that the known world can change and transmute, from whence one could emerge transformed into a new world.
Mist is endemic in the British Isles, and the Romans recorded the weather wisdom of the ancient Druids and their ability to conjure magical mists. Despite the stories’ emphasis on named gods from Egypt and Greece, they contain a remarkable amount of arcane lore of the British Isles. One feels that the “sea of wonder”—the low-lying sea of mist covering the land described in Fortune’s Avalon of the Heart 52—and the other atmospheric conditions Dion Fortune experienced around Glastonbury Tor in the 1920s made a profound impression. It is worth remembering that, at the end of her life, her focus—including that of the magnificent meditations of the war years—was upon the Matter of Britain.
Today, thanks to private transport, sophisticated buildings, and a largely interior lifestyle, we are inured to the effects of weather. It is hard to imagine the “peasouper”: the London smog (fog mixed with coal smoke) during which people could literally not see their hands in front of their faces. Deaths directly from smog led to the Clean Air Act in the 1950s, and Dion Fortune, having lived in London since 1906, would have known it well. But we have only to drive, alone, at night, with ghostly tendrils of mist curling through the beam of our headlights, to become conscious that our world is not as secure as we had formerly thought; a new element of uncertainty has intruded. We have entered liminal space: the place of both danger and new possibilities. It is a place that the author exploits most effectively.
In each book, the overwhelming need for change is aided by the weather conditions: the liminal times and states of dusk, dark, rain, fog, and mist. Most magical workers today will recognise this seeming reflecting of the inner and outer states at times of magical change: it is the beginning of the harmonising of the self with the larger workings of the universe. Once experienced, it changes our view forever: the world is seen from a larger perspective and becomes a backdrop that impacts every area of life. This understanding and feeling of connection is what will make life worthwhile, moving both the characters and the reader from spiritual impoverishment to abundance.
Natural Talent, Unnatural Circumstance,
Dangerous Consequence
The characters are all new to occult studies, but all seem to have a natural talent for contacting the unseen. Yet we would be wrong in envying the characters their ability to access extraordinary gifts, which comes from their extreme emotional circumstances. The gradual disintegration of their hold on life allows their subconscious processes to rise and become active, but this—loosening the hold on mundane life—is a very dangerous state.
The fact that they are such a disparate bunch, all very much “in the world” but in differing ways, shows us that Dion Fortune saw these capacities in all people, waiting to be developed. But the extreme way that happens in the books is something she expressly cautioned against in her nonfiction.
It is easy to overlook, on a cursory reading, the dangerous fragility of the main characters. But their worlds have turned upside down, and the descriptions, although brief, do not pull any punches. We must not underestimate the heroes’ damaged state—a state that Dion Fortune regarded as most dangerous for occult work in the real world, but one that allows her to accelerate each hero’s development under guidance.
Ted steps away from the path to the centre of the museum courtyard into the “primordial soup” in such a reckless spirit that Brangwyn later checks with him, “Had you said to evil, Be thou my good?” 53 The result of Brangwyn’s sudden appearance in response to his invocation of Pan was that ‘‘his wits were astray in the fourth dimension. … His mind had turned bottom-side up with the shock and reaction … and for the moment subconsciousness had superseded reason.” 54
Wilfred, deeply drugged, comments upon the “curious inverted sense of reality. Normal things were far away and remote and didn’t matter: but in the inner kingdom … my wishes were law.” 55 Hovering between life and death, he feels no attachment to living, and experiences “a profound sense of release; for I knew that the bars of my soul would never wholly close again.” 56
Hugh is fading away, withdrawn from the decadent lifestyle of the bright young things: he notices his own state of capriciousness, instability, and feverishness and recognises the signs of an impending breakdown. Having followed the vogue in reading psycho-analytical literature, “It amused him to realise that he … was now getting a close-up of the disintegration of a personality.” 57 But disinterest changes to concern at the end of his walk; facing the bookseller, “For a moment Hugh Paston did not know what he had come for. His mind was slipping its cogs and it scared him.”58 He realises how tenuous his hold on life has become, and that he can see no roads to travel to the future.
Rupert deliberately courts his obsessional vision until he frightens himself with semi-manifestations. Because of his medical training, he, unlike the other heroes, knows very well what he is doing. But he still continues deliberately to court Lilith, who, evoked from the depths of his soul-longing, has become indispensable to him. Like Wilfred, Rupert feels no attachment to life; gazing into the river, he confesses to Lilith that it is only because he is a strong swimmer that he hasn’t tried to plunge to his death in the Thames.
This is why Dion Fortune recommends attempting mind-expansion methods only with a trusted teacher. As examples of the inherent dangers, she instances gaining control over the autonomic nervous system—obviously essential if we are to keep breathing without our conscious control. And the danger of allowing the subconscious free rein in the everyday world, without the controlling influence of the conscious mind, goes without saying.
The tide in exploring the mysteries has turned since her day, and the fashion for being completely passive—as were the trance mediums of the day—has passed. As students we will find a balance between the inner and outer worlds in our studies, a sustainable place, as at the conclusion of each of the novels.
Awareness and application can be safe ways of inducting us into life in abundance. This becomes a dynamic dance, where we find that living with an enlarged perspective actually increases our ability to live fully and effectively in the world. The trauma and bereavement we can all expect from life will challenge and develop us for good or ill, and these are not times for occult experimentation: but the path of awareness and persistence is a gentle, enriching, and sustainable way, and is open to all.
Reaching a breaking point within the safe confines of fiction allows the portals between these places in the mind to open, and each character’s positive reaction aids the acceleration of what would otherwise be a slow process of psychic development. Dion Fortune advises us in her nonfiction: when faced with these experiences, either embrace them and make a contact or bolt from them like a rabbit down a hole, but do not linger in a state of uncertainty in that strange territory. All of our heroes embrace the challenge, and all subsequently meet their mentor, in the inner and outer worlds.
Ted Murchison calls on Pan, via the winged bull, the doorkeeper of the gods, conjuring up Brangwyn to transform his life; Hugo’s striving for depth of experience to give his life significance is taken under Pan’s protection and leads to Jelkes. By his intimate communing with the processes of the universe, Wilfred has been taken under the auspices of the moon; he meets Vivien and, later, the Priest of the Moon. And Rupert Malcolm, through synergizing his dream lady with the Goddess, is rescued by Lilith and is accepted into the service of Isis. All thus escape the fetters of society.
The heartening message is that a combination of time, place, and circumstance will manifest to further our true work, if we take the time away from the everyday to dedicate ourselves to the path and open ourselves to connection. Brodie-Innes, one of Dion Fortune’s early spiritual elders, was of the opinion that whether the unseen realms, gods, and discarnate entities exist doesn’t matter. The only thing we need to notice is that when we act as if the unseen greater reality is real, the universe seems to respond as if that is correct.
Our heroes have taken their first journey into the magical unknown. They have reviewed the past and acknowledged the reality of their inner connection and so have set out on adventures to transform their lives on the physical plane.
50. Fortune, The Sea Priestess, 4.
51. Fortune, The Goat-Foot God, 10.
52. A book about Glastonbury, first published as articles in the Society of the Inner Light’s magazine. See bibliography.
53. Fortune, The Winged Bull, 46.
54. Ibid., 14.
55. Fortune, The Sea Priestess, 13.
56. Ibid., 4.
57. Fortune, The Goat-Foot God, 13.
58. Ibid., 14.